The history of digital photography

Finally, the future of photography: Lytro light-field cameras. Announced only last week, Lytro cameras do away with photography’s 200-year relationship with lenses and apertures. Rather than focusing on a specific point and squeezing light through a complex series of lenses onto a 2D plane, light field photography scraps the idea of focus and captures the entire scene. With Lytro, you will simply point your camera at the subject, capture the entire light field, and then pick any focal point during post processing. You can take a single photo and output 100 different variations. In other words, you never need to worry about missing the focus, or falling victim to the camera’s faulty auto-focus.

So, there we have it. 30 years and 14 significant innovations was all it took to turn the century-old institution of film photography into the cutting-edge digital medium that has sought and obtained ubiquity.

If we’ve missed an important step in the evolution of digital photography, please leave a comment.

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